I had seen it all from my bath and now here it was, my dream made real in a random magazine on a café table.
Does adoption cause a vivid imagination? Filling the gap between the known and unknown with fantasy?
When you grow up in a vacuum without transparency or truth, fabrication is your only refuge. As a child, I invented stories about my mother. She was famous, of course. A musician, a painter, a scientist. She was every passing thing I ever wanted to be.
But then I’d found her and made a terrible mistake by writing to her. My letter had caused her death.
So instead I began to write about the life I imagined she had. I invented her lovers and friends. I described her elegant home with crown mouldings and tall windows and deep carpets. I gave her a golden Labrador called Otto and a troubled teenage daughter who planned to run away. Her dissatisfied husband slept on the sofa, dreaming of lingerie and a secret life he kept from her. There was even a declawed kitten that lived behind her curtains.
Over the years, the stories changed. When I had a relationship with a disingenuous writer, I processed the fallout as if it had happened to my mother. When it was over, he sent me a file of letters he’d written, one or more a day for all the months. They began with pleasure. I was the shiny new thing in his life. I was better than his wife. I was all the mysteries rolled into one. Soon enough my contradictions were my downfall. By the end, he had transformed me into his own shadow self and I became every love who had failed him.
As I read his wounding words, I pretended he was my mother’s lover, not mine. Because this is one of the things a mother does. She absorbs the blows for her child. Not all of them, and not forever. But she is there for her child of any age. When your children are small, protecting them is your overriding obsession. As mine grew up, I understood that this natural response does not change. Their danger is always my danger. Any threat to them is a threat to me.
It took a long time to realise that Mavis appeared to have no such capacity. Her parenting was competent and practical. Food, water, clothing, shelter. The mysterious and strange works of the heart were missing in our relationship. Were they unknown to her? Or was it inappropriate to share them with a stranger child?
But what if all Mavis wanted was the child she could not have, the one her heart could recognise? Perhaps she was undone by the failure of language to encompass the complexities of her inner world.
The Welsh understand. They call it hiraeth, a concept of deep homesickness. Hiraeth is more profound than just missing something. It is the unrequited hope that produces ever more unanswered longing. Welsh writer Val Bethell describes hiraeth as the language of the soul, the call from the inner self. ‘Half-forgotten — fraction remembered.’9
There is a painting that has long fascinated me. By José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior (1850–1899), Saudade shows a dark-haired woman leaning against a window. There is a tear on the side of her nose, and she is reading a letter while holding her shawl over her mouth. The painting conveys dejection and longing in every molecule of her being. I had always thought the title was the woman’s name. But then I discovered saudade is the Portuguese word for something beyond longing. There is no other word quite like it. They say it is the seventh most difficult word to translate. It describes a melancholic feeling of incompleteness, a desire for something absent that is being missed; a mysterious, transcendent and intimate mood caused by deep longing.
Was this what my past lover, the errant writer, was expressing as he filled the pages with my failings? Is this what my adopting mother was unable to communicate, even in the diligence of her caring?
The heart is the first organ that forms in the body. There is a divine symbiotic communication between the heart of the mother and that of her child. The Mexican scientist Maria Teresa Sotelo understands all this. She says the mother–child connection is far deeper than we’ve imagined. ‘The heart of the child can translate her mother’s emotions. She knows if she is loved or not.’ Sotelo describes pregnancy, birth and lactation as a process of molecular and cellular communication in the middle of an electromagnetic field. ‘The baby’s heart incorporates the heartbeat of the mother into its own heartbeat,’ she says.10
Understanding these things, I am sad for Mavis. For me, everything is in service to that longing for connection, to saudade. It is a longing that pays no heed to mortal realities. I am almost sixty and still I ache for that one thing my agnostic mind reaches for but cannot quite grasp: the sound of my mother’s heart beating within my own.
10
Abraham and Isaac went up a hill
We resumed our lives in Runanga as if I’d never been to Christchurch. I wanted Bruce to get a real job, a career. In reality, I wanted one myself but could not imagine what I could do or be.
Mavis had taken me to a careers adviser not long before I left home. They chatted as though I was not in the room.
‘Well yes,’ Mavis had said, ‘she loves to write, but her spelling is atrocious.’ She lowered her voice. ‘She wants to go into radio.’
The careers adviser ignored me. ‘It’s tough to get into radio school. You mentioned she loves horses? Farming would be a good choice. She could marry a farmer.’
We were not radio school or university people. Ideas above your station, Max said when I dared to mention it.
Now a job came up at the Runanga council. Dog-catcher. It came with
